Please note that the Greater New Orleans Green Party ceased operations after the floods of 2005. A new group is being organized in 2016 under the name Green Party of New Orleans. Find more information about the current effort at tiny.cc/gpnola, and feel free to browse this site (green.rox.com) which is being maintained as an historical record.

Ralph Nader's Speech to the NAACP

eMediaMillWorks: Tuesday, July 11, 2000

Following is the transcript of Ralph Nader's speech delivered at the
NAACP's 91st Annual Convention in Baltimore, Maryland.

NADER: Thank you very much, Chairman Bond, President Mfume and
distinguished and honored guests on the dais.

Yesterday, I read Chairman Bond's address. And I found that I had to
adjust my remarks quite a bit, otherwise I'd be accused of plagarism.

(LAUGHTER)

President Mfume brings back memories of what he did in 1991 when almost
single-handedly he saved the Community Reinvestment Act which opened up
for lending...

(APPLAUSE)

We appreciate it very much, because we've been working on bank and
insurance redlining for years. We have maps of cities all over the
country showing the discrimination in terms of where mortgage funds are
available and lenders are operating. And we are amazed at the consistent
attack on the Community Reinvestment Act led by Senator Phil Gramm from
Texas and how close it almost came to oblivion in last year's Bank
Concentration bill which unfortunately made it through and into law.

You know, there are so many people here who are veterans of past civil
rights, and civil liberties and economic justice struggles and I can see
also there are people who are young of age who intend to take the
achievements of the previous generation to new heights and to new levels
of thoroughness, but I can't go into my remarks right now without
illustrating what those new heights can be like by mentioning my friend,
Randall Robinson...

(APPLAUSE) ... because he is really a frontiersman for justice in the
sense that he's willing to take risks and break through paradigms, as he
did on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. And what he has done
since then, in breaking through again and again, illustrates that we
cannot be satisfied with the least of the worst options, whether they
are policies, whether they are politicians, or whether they are parties.
We cannot continue to wait decade after decade for injustices to be
prevented and problems to be solved while our economy goes to new levels
of growth, while corporate profits are at record levels, while budget
surpluses are at the federal and state levels getting larger.

We have fewer and fewer excuses for ignoring or being indifferent or
sloganizing the very serious and in many ways growing injustices in our
society. We have no excuse anymore in terms of saying that we don't have
the funds, that we don't have the capabilities, that we don't have the
technology, that we don't have the know-how.

I just bring to you a little fact from California. For those of you who
are skeptical of people who tell you that things are getting better but
we got to make them even better, try child poverty in California. In
1980, it was 15.2 percent; today it is 25.1 percent. And if you take
near poverty--the children who are near poverty, who I would consider in
poverty because I think the official levels of poverty are absurd, how
can anyone support a four-member family on $17,200 a year--before
deductions, before the cost of getting to work, et cetera?

(APPLAUSE)

If you add the near poverty, 46 percent of all the children in
California are in the category. This is not just a badge of shame for
our country, the richest country in the world, it's a reflection of our
inability to focus on the signal phenomena that is blocking justice, and
that is the concentration of power and wealth in too few hands. That's
it.

(APPLAUSE)

A few lessons from the past illustrate that.

What do all these movements have in common? The anti-slavery movement,
the women's right to vote movement, the worker trade union movement, the
farmer, populist, progressive movement, the civil rights, environmental,
women rights movements of recent decades, other civil rights movements,
disability rights--they had one common theme: They took power away from
people and institutions who had too much power and made that power be
shared by the many.

That is what made it possible. It wasn't just the documentation of
injustice. It wasn't just the feeling by people that they had to have a
better life. It was the strategy of power. It was the strategy of
deconcentrating power. It was the strategy that confronted the dominant
business powers of our history which uniquely were always in the
forefront of saying no to social justice movements.

Who opposed the anti-slavery movement? Who opposed the women's right to
vote movement? It wasn't just some men. It was the railroads, it was the
liquor industry, it was industrial interests that didn't want women to
speak out with voting power against child labor and the injustices of
the Industrial Revolution.

And who opposed the workers in the steel, coal, textile and other areas
trying to unionize? It was the corporations. And who opposed the
farmers, dirt-poor farmers coming out of Texas? It was the big banks and
the insurance companies.

And I might say it's much the same today. Who opposed Social Security?
The corporate lobbies and their allies in Congress. Who opposed one
advance after another in terms of equal opportunity of employment, in
terms of anti-discrimination efforts in housing? Who opposed the
consumer movement to try to reduce death and injury on the part of
innocent consumers because of hazardous products and toxic chemicals and
other sources of trauma? The corporations did.

Who opposed the drive for environmental health in our country? Who
opposed the effort to end this silent cumulative violence that we too
charitably call pollution, air, water pollution, pesticides?

Who opposed those? The corporations did.

Who opposed the effort which is now 60 years in failure to take
lead-based paint off crumbling tenement walls in the cities, the kind of
deadly lead-based paint that to this day is poisoning 200,000 minority
children a year, damaging their brain and other organs? It was the
interests, the prosperity holders, the landlords, the big apartment
owners, the slum lords.

And I think all of these social justice movements finally prevailed,
with few exceptions, and America was better as a result, and still we
must ask ourselves, what are the sources of power that are keeping us
from progressing and advancing?

We live now in an apartheid economy. It is an economy of such staggering
inequities that mere words and statistics hardly can do it justice. It
is an economy where one man, Bill Gates, has as much wealth as the
combined wealth of the bottom 120 million Americans.

(APPLAUSE)

That means--apart from what that says about the great software imitator
from Redmond, Washington, that means that there are millions of
Americans who are working, year after year, decade after decade, and are
just plain broke. They have no capital share, they're moving, if they're
lucky, from paycheck to paycheck; if they're less lucky, from payday
loan to payday loan, paying outrageous levels of interest to the loan
sharks and going deeper and deeper into debt, which now totals, for all
consumers in this country, $6.2 trillion--$6.2 trillion.

The inequities are even more staggering worldwide. I just received
information, the latest data: The 250 richest people in the world have
the combined income of the bottom three billion people in the world.

And to give you a further illustration, the top 1 percent of the richest
people in our country have wealth--financial wealth equal to the bottom
95 percent.

Now let's look at ordinary working folk. We have 130 million paying jobs
in this country; 40 million are part-time. And according to the
Department of Labor, if you work 21 hours a week, even if you want a
full-time job and can't get it, you're considered employed.

So let's not pay much attention to the 4 percent unemployment rate. It's
more like 13 percent generally, and more like 25 percent for minorities.

(APPLAUSE)

But 47 million workers in this country who get up every morning and go
to work are making less than $10 an hour. Many of them, 10 million of
them, minimum wage--federal minimum wage, $5.15, others $6, 7, 8 an
hour. You can't make a livable wage at the level that Wal-Mart or Kmart
or McDonald's pays, much less afford a family on that. The minimum
wage...

(APPLAUSE)

The minimum wage, I might add, today, is far less than it was in 1960,
1970, in terms of purchasing power. Imagine, we're sliding backwards at
a time when our economy overall is booming and corporate profits are
booming and we have government surpluses.

Now there's a lesson in that. The lesson is why is that happening? There
are a few principles that I have operated by in my 40 years of work in
trying to advance justice in our country. One of them is the definition
of freedom that goes back to ancient Rome. I think you'll like it.
Freedom is participation in power. Freedom is participation in power.

(APPLAUSE)

The second is a description of justice as the great work of human beings
on Earth, justice. You notice a lot of politicians give speeches--like
I've read almost all of Ronald Reagan's speeches and it's full--their
speeches are full of liberty and freedom, but they never use the word
justice. I wonder why. Because justice means redistribution of power and
opportunity and income and livelihood, that's what justice means.

(APPLAUSE)

And, third, a society that has more justice is a society that needs less
charity--more justice, needs less charity.

And, fourthly, the only place where democracy comes before work is in
the dictionary.

(LAUGHTER)

And, fifthly, and this is out of ancient China. An ancient Chinese
philosopher once said, quote, ``To know and not to act is not to know.''
To know is not to act, not to know. You can put that one on your
friendly politician's back once in a while. They know, but they are not
acting. And we know that they know and they are not acting.

And let me tell you, in this country of ours, when it comes to
indifference to injustice, I would almost prefer a provocateur than an
anesthesizer.

(APPLAUSE)

And let me just run through--and I'd like to start with the global
description first, because this is where we really see the deficiencies
of a system that needs major, major renovation.

All over the world, we have millions of people, many of them children,
dying from global infectious diseases. Malaria is killing over one
million people in Africa, most of them little children. Tuberculosis,
which is a curable disease starting in the 1950s, is taking about two
million lives. And I needn't describe the horrible scourge of AIDS.

Now, what are we doing about this as a nation? What are we doing in
terms of training people to deal with these infectious diseases that are
coming our way in drug-resistant form? What are we doing in terms of the
resources?

Well, let me tell you what we're doing: We're almost doing nothing. We
are willing to spend $60 billion on a missile defense system that
doesn't even work, according to the leading physicists of our country.

(APPLAUSE)

And you know what we spent last year on global malaria? $47 million. We
spent about $50 million on tuberculosis. A B-2 bomber, which the
Pentagon doesn't want any more of but which the PAC-greased Congress
majority seems to want to demand more to be constructed on behalf of
their corporate sponsors, costs $2 billion.

A few months ago I was meeting with the scientists at the Walter Reed
Institute of Health at the Department of Army. These are the Ph.D.s and
the M.D.s who almost alone in our country, on a tiny budget, are working
to find vaccines and drugs against malaria, hepatitis and other deadly
diseases. And their entire budget for research and development was $25
million a year. And for the laboratories around the world that spot
epidemics it totaled about another $70 million.

And I asked them, How much do you spend to produce a new drug? They
discovered three out of the four anti-malarial drugs, for example. And
they said between $5 million and $10 million.

Do you know what the drug companies tell us as justification for their
high drug prices, how much they have to spend for a new drug? $300
million to $500 million. That's so-called private enterprise, and right
in our own government we have scientists who are showing the way, but
they don't have enough support. It's the best keep secret in Washington.
I had to open up appointments with members of Congress for these
brigadier generals and captains, all of them Ph.D.s and doctors, to go
up on Capitol Hill a few months ago for the first time.

Now, that is such a distortion in the expenditure of tax money as to
boggle the mind.

And let me give you an illustration of how easy it is to go after some
of the worst problems of poverty in our country. It comes from the UN
Development Program. The UN Development Program, which is an
extraordinary research and development effort, is part of the United
Nations, and I just want to give you an illustration of what it is.

They say for $40 billion a year--that's $40 billion--applied to the
needy of the world, they can provide basic sanitation and drinking water
safety, basic nutritional needs, basic health care and significant
education for these children. That's $40 billion a year in the same
world that spends $850 billion a year on military equipment.

Now, this is, in a sense, a message of hope, is it not? It's a message
that if we can get enough civic power to redirect some of the enormous
tax dollars that go to corporate subsidies, giveaways, handouts,
bailouts, and that go for the military machine driven by corporate
profits of Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics and others, we could
redirect some of these monies to accelerate at unheard of levels the
well-being of the oppressed and the impoverished and the desperate
people and children in this world.

(APPLAUSE)

That is the national purpose that's connected with a new definition of
national security, is it not? Isn't that national security well written?
The security of reducing poverty and infectious diseases and the
destruction of environments which are undermining the very ability of
people in the world to eke out a living--massive soil erosion, poisoned
water, contaminated, choking air pollution, just for starters; areas of
forest cut down, perhaps never to be revived again.

The concentration of power is an issue that must be high on our agenda.
Indeed, you talk to Maxine Waters, she knows what the concentration of
power is like. She tried to get checking accounts for poor
people--lifeline checking accounts in the bank bill last year, and the
Republicans and the White House turned a deaf ear.

Do you know there are over 25 million people in this country who cannot
afford checking accounts? That's raw power by the banks.

John Conyers knows what raw power is. He's been trying to raise the
issue of commercial crimes, especially in the inner city but generally
all over, a corporate crime epidemic that is eating the life out of
family budgets. Just look at the major newspapers and the TV, and see
how they are documenting these predations.

In just one area, health care, the General Accounting Office estimates
$1 out of every $10 is drained away from us by billing fraud and abuse.
You know these bills that are in code, who can understand them, right?
You know what that amounts to this year? That's 10 percent of the health
care budget. That's over $110 billion--billion. Now that could cover a
good many of the 46 million people who are not covered by any health
insurance policies.

The agenda that we are proposing here is an agenda that is marked by
three characteristics: one, it doesn't cost all that much money. To
shift power from the haves to the have-nots and give people a chance to
band together to pursue justice, which is essential to the pursuit of
happiness, does not cost that much money.

And, secondly, this agenda deals with the essential premise of
democracy, that all people have to feel that they can participate, they
can deliberate, and they can have an impact on their own grievances and
the future of the country.

And the third is that we have to recognize that those who are
excessively greedy and excessively powerful must--must give up their
privileges. They must give up some of their power. I will read you...

(APPLAUSE)

I will read you a quote that many of you are familiar with. Quote, ``We
have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and
non-violent pressure. Lamentably, it is a historical fact that
privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust
posture, but as Reinhold Neibuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more
immoral than individuals,'' end quote. That was the Reverend Martin
Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

(APPLAUSE)

Let me go through the agenda very quickly and you'll see more of what I
mean. This is in addition to the NAACP agenda which all of you have, and
it's in addition to many of the advocacies that you've heard at this
convention. Some of it is redundant, but I want to elaborate it.

First and foremost, the biggest single obstacle to honest, just and
effective government action, a government of, by, and for the people, is
the corruption of special interest money in our election campaigns.

And...

(APPLAUSE)

As the NAACP has said, we must have full public financing for public
elections.

Where...

(APPLAUSE)

Where in the world did we ever get a system where public schools are
publicly financed, public parks are publicly financed, but the essential
phenomena of a democracy, public elections, are up for bid to the
highest bidder as if it's an auction block?

(APPLAUSE)

And I commend the Fanny Lou Farmer's (ph) wonderful initiative that is
just under way to have full public financing. And those of you who
missed the handout here that described it, just look at the second page
and the comment by civil rights veteran and history professor Roger
Wilkens when he said, quote, ``I believe deeply that the deprivation of
the poor and the excluded, by making our electoral process a rich,
white, male corporate game, is as brutal an exclusion of the poor and
the black and other minorities as any form of discrimination that we
have known and categorized as civil rights all our lives. I think it is
undeniable that it is a basic civil rights issue,'' end quote. Very,
very well said.

(APPLAUSE)

Number two, we need to discuss the question of a non-livable wage in our
country. There are a number of ways where we can lift the economic
standards of living of people, in addition to enforcing the civil rights
laws. One of them is to repeal the restrictive labor laws which obstruct
tens of millions of Americans from the same right that people have in
other Western countries to form trade unions, and that includes the
repeal of the notorious Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

(APPLAUSE)

Less than 10 percent of workers in this country in the private sector
are unionized. This is the lowest level in 60 years in our country and
by far lower than other Western nations.

We need also to address the minimum wage and change its name. A minimum
wage that is not a livable wage can never be a minimum wage in our
country.

(APPLAUSE)

The livable wage should move to $10 an hour as soon as possible--as soon
as possible.

(APPLAUSE)

NADER: Do the more affluent people understand how much it costs just to
get to work in America, how much it costs waiting for the buses that
almost never come on schedule, or too few buses, or having to buy
another car, or an insurance policy, and repair, and day care, and
wondering who's going to take care of the sick parent, and being clogged
in traffic, and losing time, and not being able to spend time with
children or a family or community? That's the cost of getting to work.

(APPLAUSE)

In Europe they have laws that they call a social wage law. It doesn't
matter whether you belong to a union or not, you're a worker in many of
these countries in West Europe, you have certain rights. You have a
month's paid vacation, you know not just 12 days off for family leave
unpaid, you have paid family leave, you have longer maternity leave, you
have the kind of civilized rights that our country, the richest country
in the world, still hasn't gotten around to provide. It is time for a
change; the system is not working.

(APPLAUSE)

Another way to raise standards of living is to have progressive taxation
mean what it says, instead of these rich corporations and rich people
who have all these tax lawyers showing them how they can become tax
escapees. They're not paying their fair share. There are corporations in
this country that get off paying virtually no tax.

General Electric for three years, in 1981 to '83, made $6.2 billion in
profit, didn't pay a penny in federal income tax. That means one worker
in General Electric, one worker, paid more to Uncle Sam in sheer dollars
than the giant General Electric company--which, by the way, finagled the
tax laws where it got $120 million refund on top of paying no taxes.

(APPLAUSE)

And then there's the estate tax. Have you heard about that one?

I thought Charlie Rangel devastated the arguments of the Republicans and
some Democrats who want to get rid of the estate tax, when it only
applies to the top 2 percent of the estates and in terms of the $27
billion it raises every year it's only a few tens of thousands of super
rich estates who didn't happen to be counseled by clever estate lawyers.

And thirdly, we need a law and order campaign against powerful lobbyists
and institutions. That means we've got to crack down on the consumer
fraud that goes on in this country. And as you know, the poor pay more,
the poor are sick more, the poor die more. These are some of the most
rapacious, predatory practices that the imagination of a gouging
corporation or merchant could possibly conceive.

We also need, of course, a way to effectively distinguish the words
``welfare,'' ``violence,'' ``regulation'' and ``crime.'' When reporters
ask me about these questions I say, You better specify: Are you talking
about corporate welfare or poverty welfare?

(APPLAUSE)

Are you talking about street crime or corporate crime?

(APPLAUSE)

Which the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others have chronicled
as being far more devastating in terms of lives lost, injuries
inflicted, disease perpetrated than even street crime, horrible as
street crime is. Far more die from preventable criminal negligence in
the workplace, in the factory, in the mine. They die from toxics that
they're exposed to--asbestos, lead. They die from reckless hospital
practices. They die from the kinds of addictions that are coming from
some of Fortune 500 corporations, beamed to the very young to hook them
into a lifetime of smoking and other addictions.

Fourth, universal health insurance--not much needs to be said about this
except two things: It's got to be accessible--it's got to be accessible,
it's got to focus on preventive health, and it's got to be monitored by
organizations of health care consumers so they can monitor the HMOs and
monitor the hospital chains and in many ways be the majordomo to make
sure that the vigilance is there and that these systems, once put in
place, work.

Five, we need to end corporate welfare as we know it.

(APPLAUSE)

And I'm not even--I'm not even willing to say five years and out. This
is aid to dependent corporations.

(LAUGHTER)

And it's time that their bleeding of tax dollars by hardworking
Americans be ended so that these tax dollars be used for serious
purposes, not for stadiums and arenas while schools and clinics crumble
from lack of repair.

(APPLAUSE)

Not corporate subsidies to big drug companies who don't want to do any
research for drugs or vaccines on AIDS or TB or malaria or other
diseases in this country because they can't make big money off of it. We
have to stop that.

Six, we have to look at our criminal justice system and ask why it's so
criminal.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

Why is it that it breeds exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to
deter and prevent? Why is it--and anybody who says that this criminal
justice system with its corporate prison industry, its notoriously
discriminatory death penalty--you know, there was a--there was a
executive in California the other day, you may have read it.

He ran a sausage plant and he got really upset with two federal meat
inspectors and a state inspector and he shot and killed them. And people
saw it. Do you really think he's ever going to get the death penalty if
he's convicted? No way.

This is an extremely discriminatory penalty that is a scar, it does not
deter. Defendants who are poor are not given competent counsel who even
stay awake during the trial...

(APPLAUSE)

... much less the kind of defense that our Constitution warrants all
accused defendants.

And we need also to recognize that legal service for the poor is
underfunded. I just realized the other day, its budget is under $300
million a year. And did you know that the Pentagon now has a policy of
using your tax dollars to subsidize mergers between two big defense
companies? And they spend $1.5 billion just for the marriage of Martin
Marietta and Lockheed. That's five years budget of legal services for
the poor.

It really is time to ask ourselves how can we allow the rich and
powerful not only to rip off people as consumers, but to continue to rip
them off as taxpayers?

Institutional building is another part of the agenda. In 1908 and 1909,
the same people who were fighting for civil rights in those days could
have said to themselves, We're too busy fighting the specific struggles
right now in Philadelphia or New York to start a new institution.
Instead, they didn't do that. They started the NAACP. And that is what
institution building is all about. Think...

(APPLAUSE)

Think of the leverage--think of the leverage throughout the decades from
the NAACP's championing of civil rights; it's winning one Supreme Court
case after another.

I was a law student when I first heard Thurgood Marshall come and speak.
And he was--this is before he was all that well known. And he inspired
us, all of us--550 members of the class of 1958, with two
African-Americans in the audience.

I remember also other institutions which were built--the ACLU and
others. We now have to build more institutions. We've got to build
institutions to deal with the horrific risks of biotechnology--you want
to talk about genetic discrimination, just think what's coming--to deal
with the artificial intelligence of computers, and the replacement of
interpersonal education, with our children looking at screens, day after
day, at age 6, or 8, or 9, as if they don't look at screens enough when
they go home and watch television.

We need institutions that allow us to band together vis-a-vis banks,
insurance companies, HMOs, cable companies, landlords. All of these can
be done. We know how to do it. We've just got to focus on it.

We started in our class at Harvard--the 1958 law school class. Let me
tell you, there were a lot of corporate lawyers in that class. Yet we
are now starting centers for law and justice all over the United States.
We've got them in 12 states, and we're going for almost all the states.
That's just one law school class shoehorning and mobilizing people of
good will to start systemic centers for law and justice--systemic, not
remedial, not charity, systemic.

Environment--environmental racism especially is a disgrace of neglect.
How long, oh how long must we wait before we remove this constant
intimacy between deadly toxic materials and our children? Asthma levels
in Hartford 41 percent among minority children--41 percent. And around
the country, they're reaching record levels.

Aren't we a country that can at least give our little ones a chance to
breathe, literally? To breathe?

(APPLAUSE)

We also need to pay attention to controlling what we already own. That
may seem abstract, but we own, as a people, the public airways; we don't
control them. We own the public lands, one-third of America, rich
resources; we don't control them. We have $5 trillion to $6 trillion in
pension, worker funds; we don't control their investment.

Now, imagine, what can happen if political campaigns began paying
attention to controlling what we own. Here's what could happen. We'd
have our own radio station, our own television station, our own cable
channel. People who are trying to improve their local cities will become
civic celebrities.

Now, look at your late-evening news, if you can bear it. Look at it.
It's 30 minutes. Nine minutes of ads; three minutes of street crime
right at the beginning, never corporate crime, very superficially
covered; one minute of impromptu chit-chat between the anchors; four
minutes of weather; four minutes of sports and that's what happens in
your town tonight. And we own the public airways. It's a disgrace.

(APPLAUSE)

I remember--many of us remember Julius Hobson here in Washington, D.C.,
a government statistician who was a civic leader trying to improve
education in this district. And he could command a press conference.
When he spoke people listen.

Today, you have similar people trying to improve the District of
Columbia and other jurisdictions, but they don't get on the evening
news. Nobody knows what they're doing. Nobody can be motivated. Nobody
can join what they're doing because what we own, the public airways, has
been surrendered to the most myopic and avaricious corporations running
these TV and radio stations as if they can trivialize our public trust,
marginalize our public commitment, and sensationalize our time.

(APPLAUSE)

I ask you, is there a word greater than grotesque for this phenomena?

Consider all the news of the distressed and the disadvantaged and the
transgressed that should be on TV and radio so that they can commit a
process of resolution. And then look at all the thousands of hours that
covered Tonya Harding and O.J. Simpson's trial and Elian. Think of the
thousands of hours crowding out the kind of real news that we want...

(APPLAUSE)

... and I say--and I say...

(APPLAUSE)

... and I say it's time to have our own television station, radio
stations and cable channels.

And I might add--I might add, do you know what's going on on Capitol
Hill now? The community radio licenses that the FCC wants to give to
neighborhood groups. You know they they have a three-mile radii so
people can mobilize their community.

The broadcast industry, having gotten the public airways free--they
don't pay any rent, by the way, to us the landlord--they got $70 billion
of new spectrum free four years ago. Now they're up on Capitol Hill to
reverse the FCC and prevent the neighborhood groups from having their
tiny little community radio stations.

Now is there anything--is there a word beyond greed that can describe
that kind of over-reaching?

(APPLAUSE)

Education: You've heard about repairing schools? How long, how long does
it take to repair schools?

(APPLAUSE)

I'm so tired of these symbolic gestures, you know. How long does it
take? And you know, I know the Democrats like to blame a lot of this on
the Republican-controlled Congress. But, you know, how bad a party do
you have to be to let the Congress of the United States be taken over by
the likes of Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott?

(APPLAUSE)

But in education, I have two points to make that aren't often made.

The tyranny of standardized testing is becoming the be-all and do-all
for principals and teachers and school districts. It is distorting the
whole curriculum.

Now we first blew the top off standardized testing fraud in 1980 with a
study on the Educational Testing Service. And guess what? We found there
was an invincible correlation between test scores and family income. I
wonder why. I wonder why.

We also found that these tests are straitjackets. They don't recognize
multiple intelligences. They don't recognize the assets that people have
that spell success in life. Do they measure determination? Do they
measure stamina, creativity, idealism, wisdom, judgment, experience?
They don't.

(APPLAUSE)

And now--and now they're becoming a yoke on our school system where
school districts, principals, teachers all measured by test scores and
guess who develops these tests? Corporate consulting firms who have
their eye on the public school system of America in order to corporatize
them.

(APPLAUSE)

Finally, we need a national Marshall Plan to abolish poverty in the
United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

A hundred years ago--100 years ago reformers said that we could abolish
poverty in the next generation. And in the next generation we have
enormous poverty in the country in the midst of enormous affluence by
the few at the expense of the many. There are corporations who must be
scheduled for reparations in our country, Aetna (ph) being one for
example.

It's often said there is an intergenerational responsibility for
slavery, for brutality, and people in this generation say, Well, I
didn't have anything to do with that. And what's that got to do with me?

Well, you know what? Corporations have been around for a long time.
They've got perpetual life. And they operated and benefited from the
repression of innocent people in this country, and they should be
required to pay.

(APPLAUSE)

And I might add, you can even talk about a Marshall Plan for the poor in
one life cycle. Our society takes away so much from innocent, poor
children that it's only fair to give back some of that to them as young
adults so they can have a chance.

Let me tell you, when I'm asked about affirmative action, I ask--I
answer with this question, What affirmative action? Three hundred years
of white male affirmative action that have benefitted...

(APPLAUSE)

... that have benefited us?

Talking with Justice Department lawyers--let me tell you how far
symbolism has gotten. Justice Department lawyers today in the Civil
Rights Division have informed me that the actual enforcement of those
laws in terms of litigation is less today in two out of three major
areas than in the previous administration. It's less in the area of
affirmative action and police brutality, and it's higher in the area of
housing discrimination.

And I think we've got to really get beyond the symbolism here and ask
ourselves whether only by building new political power, new economic
power, new media power, new civic power for all Americans, only by doing
that are we going to turn around the headlong rush into systemic and
institutionalized injustice shortchanging the lives of future
generations and damaging the lives of present generations.

And this is why I am running. This is why I am running for the
presidency of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

My mother once told us as a child, Determination is what puts your
dreams on wheels. We have got to be determined that we are not going to
be flimflammed, we are not going to be sweet-talked, we are not going to
be regaled with rhetoric, that we are only interested in justice as a
result, not justice as a broken promise.

It is important...

(APPLAUSE)

It is important, in conclusion, to look forward to this November as a
way for people who have been told too long by both parties that they
have nowhere to go other than to stay home and not vote or to vote for
one of the two parties.

If you ever wondered why the right wing and the corporate wing of the
Democratic Party has so much more power over that party than the
progressive wing, it's because the right wing and the corporate wing
have somewhere to go: It's called the Republican Party. And so they're
catered to and they're regaled--like the Democratic Leadership Council,
they're catered to and they're regaled.

But if you look at the progressive wing, if you look at working
families, if you look at trade unions, look at groups trying to advance
civil rights and consumer rights and environmental rights, they have
nowhere to go.

And you know when you're told that you have nowhere to go, you get taken
for granted. And when you get taken for granted, you get taken.

(APPLAUSE)

So I hope that you will connect with us. Our web site is either
VoteNader.org or VoteNader.com.

The Green Party platform hands down is the most thorough,
justice-saturated platform of any political party platform of the day.
Reminds me of some of the great platforms of many decades ago when
parties--at least one stood tall for the working people of this country.

And I hope that in many ways you will eschew the counsel of those who
say that things are getting better, that just keep on with us, that just
stick with us, and every four years both get worse--both parties get
worse. And we've waited 1980 and '84 and '88 and '92 and '96, and as
Martin Luther King said in his famous Letter from the Birmingham jail,
``How long can we wait?'' We cannot wait any longer. Too much is at
stake.

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